


But Heaven is Too Perfect

by TheColorBlue



Category: BioShock Infinite
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-17
Updated: 2013-05-17
Packaged: 2017-12-12 02:54:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/806343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheColorBlue/pseuds/TheColorBlue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Booker takes stock of what he does and does not know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	But Heaven is Too Perfect

Booker DeWitt has never seen anything like Columbia, and he's having nearly a hard time even processing the whole damn picture of it. Have you ever seen anything, and it's so beyond you that you find your mind drawing blanks whenever you try to examine it closer? It's firing a gun without ammunition, all sound and no impact--or at least, whatever impact there is, it's hard to quantify. DeWitt's no scientist. He can feel the air move, the force of the recoil jarring through his bones, but he couldn't put down in words exactly what is going on.

Booker DeWitt sees a city in the sky, and all he knows is hot air balloons, without even really knowing how the things work. You don't have to know how a train works to know that it's going to get you from one city to the next.

When Booker arrives in Columbia, the grandeur of the welcome hall is beyond him. He's never seen anything like it: the marble, the water flowing freely, the candles and the flowers. When he finally makes his way into the gardens and streets of the city itself--when he sees the buildings floating impossible in the sky--

Booker is not a visionary. He's not an artist, or scientist, or philosopher. There are books full of things he's never bothered to try to imagine.

Yet, too, there are no books that could possibly contain the unimaginable horrors he's seen, or wrought with his own two hands.

Perhaps it all evens out.

He takes a minute to simply sit on a bench in New Eden Square, but not to enjoy his surroundings in a leisurely way. Booker does not enjoy a lot of things. There is a fast, unreal feeling to his life. In his New York flat, he drank so he didn't have to think. Even when he was working a case, somehow, there was a part of him that wasn't--

What Booker is doing, sitting on that bench in New Eden Square, is taking stock of where he is, and how he will proceed. There is a part of him that isn't thinking too hard about all of this at all--

No. That is a lie.

There is a part of him that is taking stock of his surroundings so far as he can understand them, so that he can make his way through in the most efficient method possible. The other part of him, perhaps the instinctive part of him, has hackles raised in suspicion. Something is wrong. No city is this perfect, this wondrous, without a price underneath it. Booker knows all about price and debt.

He looks again at the photo of the girl, and he thinks: he'll find her and get the both of them out of the city as quickly as he can. There's a feeling in that floating city, bitter and strange, what with the angel set against the clouds, and the worshipful crowds, and up here the sun seems far, too harshly bright.

Booker is too eager to escape this place, and return to his own godforsaken flat; maybe it isn't heaven, but at least it is a place whose ills feel familiar to him, and the walls of which are intimately known.


End file.
